This invention refers to an hood for the protection of premises.
There is at this time, in particular in the oenological or general liquid product bottling trade, or at any rate in all processes exposing a product to outside air, a particularly felt need to operate in premises to be protected as far as possible from potential contaminants originating from the processing premises themselves, while at the same time maintaining a possibility to steam out and sterilize the processing machines (rinsing, filling and capping machines) with appropriate chemicals, so as to ensure a high quality and long lifetime for the bottled product.
The oenological machines are generally installed in premises equipped with laminar flow covers fitted with filters; covers of this type are constituted of an enclosure encompassing the machine and fitted with one or more openings to admit air, one or more openings to expel air and at least one door admitting to the interior of the enclosure, designed to allow ordinary maintenance operations or at any rate to manually operate its regulating elements or devices.
Moreover, a laminar flow of air, at least through openings facing outward and parallel to the vertical walls, is usually injected so as to achieve a reasonable degree of cleanliness in the premises housing the machine, even where said premise have to communicate with the outer environment to allow the passing of operators (sterile combination chambers).
However, the use of such covers fails to achieve a high degree of air purity and the parts not directly invested by the laminar flow may suffer from an increased contamination; this consequently leads to considerable drawbacks in premises housing machines designed for the processing of foodstuffs, due to the fact that the latter exhibit undercuts, moving parts, horizontal surfaces or points difficult to reach.
Moreover, the steam released during the sterilizing phase of parts of the machine or containers tends to foul and plug the clean air filters at the inlet.
Another drawback is determined by the condensed liquid forming on the filters, due to the precipitation of steam or chemicals to be purged, which are pushed up by their lesser density (in case of steam); the condensation liquid deposited in the filters causes the machine to drip, thus leading to even greater damages than in the absence of covers, especially as said liquid constitutes a major carrier of bacteria and eventually of accumulating dust.
In other designs, the covers may be substituted by actual xe2x80x9cwhitexe2x80x9d or sterile chambers, capable of providing a specific control of the degree of purity of the air contained in them.
In order to achieve a high degree of purity in the premises under control, the sterile chambers are usually connected to ante-chambers capable of effecting a pretreatment of the incoming air; a subsequent treatment, generally performed by complex and expensive equipment and over rather extensive periods of time allows achieving an extremely high degree of air purity inside the premises to be controlled.
However, whenever the presence of an operator is needed inside a sterile chamber, for example for the performing of maintenance, for regulating or parts replacing on a machine, said operator must wear certain clothes (coverall, face mask and gloves) which could hinder him in performing certain operations.
Finally and as mentioned, the setting up of protected premises for installing food processing machines requires that proper consideration be given to the high installation and operating costs of a sterile chamber, so as to make it possible to thoroughly evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the various solutions adopted.
The scope of this invention is therefore to eliminate the mentioned technical drawbacks, by producing a hood for the protection of premises, capable of achieving a considerable degree of purity in their interior, at rather limited costs based on the resulting advantages.
Another purpose of this invention is to achieve a hood for the protection of premises, in particular for premises designed to hold machines for treating foodstuffs in a controlled atmosphere.
A further purpose of the invention is to produce a protective hood for premises, in particular for premises designed for the installation of oenological machines such as rinsing, filling and capping machines, capable of allowing any operations, throughout the processing phases exposing foodstuffs to air, to be performed in an ambiance essentially protected from any contaminants originating from the same operating premises, and at the same time of maintaining the possibility of sterilizing and steaming one or more parts of the machine itself.
Still another purpose of the invention is to produce a hood for the protection of premises capable of allowing the protections to be opened so as to perform certain maintenance, sterilizing and/or steaming operations.
Not the least purpose of the invention is to produce a hood for the protection of premises of a safe and reliable kind and in an essentially simple and inexpensive manner with respect to the known art, based on the resulting advantages.
These and other purposes, according to this invention, are achieved by producing a hood for the protection of premises according to claim 1, which is being referred to for brevity.
Other characteristics of the invention are described in subsequent claims.
In an advantageous manner, this means in practice producing a chamber with a controlled and/or sterile atmosphere based on a forced air flow, constituted by the superposition of two hoods set up one inside the other, so as to be compatible with the requirements of achieving a high degree of air purity in the premises even if it becomes necessary to inject steam or a sanitizing liquid on parts or portions of machines installed in said premise, requirements which are normally conflicting.
In particular, this achieves the further advantage, whenever it is desirable to perform some container filling operations by oenological filling machines in a controlled atmosphere based on sanitized air, of eliminating the special protections normally employed while passing the bottles through the machines of a known type.